At 01:52 AM 17/10/2007, you wrote:

>Helen,
>
>I'd appreciate if you would verify whether the following is a correct
>understanding of your last reply.
>
>1. "Autocast" from a CHAR column in an external table to a VARCHAR
>column in an internal table will trim trailing blanks.

On storing them, yes.

>2. "Autocast" does not treat null characters differently than any other
>characters.

That's right.

(But things are likely to get complicated if you throw a UDF with a
CSTRING argument into the mix...)

>3. It's "optimal" to load about 8,000 rows at a time from an external
>table into an internal table. (The number of columns in the tables I'm
>dealing with vary from 7 to 523 with an average of 52.)

Not quite. 8,000 rows *per transaction* (more or less, depending on
factors like row size, presence or not of indexes, dependencies,
other connections, etc.) has been noted as a good starting point as
the batching size for bulk inserts. It is not some deterministic
number, nor even "optimal in every case."

I've been wondering whether you spec'ed the input file based on the
belief that string fields were *required* to be null-terminated....?

./heLen